panel -reorganised

(A Panel Discussion moderated by Prof P Venkataramaiah(PV). Panelists : Dr. N K Sanghi(NKS), Mr. M. V. Sastri (MVS), Prof Prajit Basu(PS), Prof Shiv Vishwanathan(SV), and Mr Walter Mendoza (WM)

(This is an edited version of the discussion, and the order has been changed for purposes of continuity – Ed).

Any Public Policy is supposed to be people friendly. The fact that we are discussing it means that at least this panel feels that it is not always people friendly. It also means that that the government is catering to particularly interests and not those of the people at large, and that we should be trying to make the policies people friendly.(PV).

Shiv Viswanathan: Kafka wrote a story about a sacrifice in India. A group of villagers near a forest decide to hold a sacrifice. They decide to sacrifice a lot of fruits and vegetables to the full moon. Just as it is full moon, a tiger comes and eats the high priest. The religious were stunned but being faithful people they decided to hold another sacrifice. And at that time also the tiger came and ate the priest again. At this time, there developed a situation which some would call a "crisis". They did not know what to do, so they called a panchayat meeting. At the panchayat meeting the village idiot who I think was the first policy scientist came up with the suggestion, he said "Why not make the tiger eating the priest a part of the ritual?

And I think to certain an extent statements of policy reflect the same kind of banalisation. What I am trying to say is that we need a cognitive indifference to policy in certain domains of our life, because policy in a narrative sense is a banalization of politics. When we talk about policy, we use terms without any idea of their genealogy or any idea of their genocidal consequences. Let me take one term, which everyone has used in a very friendly way - ‘people friendly’. There is one whole book to show that this is the most genocidal terms in history. You use the word ‘people’ for those who don’t have a nation or a state.

Policy is a creation between science, nation and state for citizens. ‘People’ are citizenless people (like gypsies) therefore they can be eliminated . You can’t extend rights to refugees once they have crossed the borders of their nation state. Once they become stateless people they have no human rights. We are using the word people, which is one of the most genocidal terms in history in an amiable-happy way in our discourses. I am afraid such innocence is not possible. Any kind of friendliness to people’s friendliness is something I object to.

It is not just a critique of science that we want. I think we are using a whole set of category and terms without knowing their genealogy, any sense of its politics and any sense of consequences it may lead to.(SV)

Technology & Labour
When we talk of Technology, we by and large we speak about a technological change which enhances productivity. This productivity can be linked to the intensification of capital, or increasing productivity of labour. However, we see that productivity is linked more to intensification of capital, and labour is seen more as liability. Thus technological progress in real terms could mean the increase of unemployment, and the productivity attributed to the increasing and intensity of capital and perhaps a higher value for a few "technologists". This causes concern.

There are probably four paradigms of dealing with this contraction between labour and capital in the technology policy.

Market paradigm : Under this paradigm, technological progress is necessary for productivity and the growth of the economy. We leave it to the market to provide capital for technological progress, to improve productivity, and open up trade to incentivise the capital, thus providing growth. This growth improves the national gross product, and thereby employment. It is also realised that there may be market failures, as well as employment problems, and for this view which is also known as the World Bank View, must have safety nets, like unemployment insurance, and monetary policy.

Socialist Paradigm: This paradigm calls for a redistribution of capital and labour. In fact, you merge the two categories. This is done by making labour owners of the capital, possibly under the dictatorship of the proletariat. The second solution for this problem is redistribution of labour and capital.

Appropriate Technology Paradigm: Under this paradigm, the idea is to use technology which does not displace people, as well as technology which is labour intensive. This paradigm is also associated with the Gandhian way of low mechanisation. This paradigm is also associated with environmental re-generation. The problem with this development is that it is seen as anti-development and anti-growth. It is felt that while this approach may protect livelihoods, there is no progress.

Compensatory paradigm: The fourth paradigm relating to the technology policy is to go for technology, but compensate the affected people adequately, so that you have both growth and non-displacement. This is a social-democrat position. type of paradigm that usually people offer is: Get technology and compensate the affected people adequately so that you have both growth and as well as non displacement. The problem is how do you really compensate for the loss of livelihood? How do you place a value on it? How do you determine second level of induced displacement?

So these are the four paradigms of technology policy in terms of the contradiction between labour and capital. (PV)
The other issue is equity.

Equity V/s Growth
Technology is expected to fuel growth. There is a trade off between growth and equity. This trade off is projected to be a short term. Eventually, growth is supposed to increase employment. Thus the debate is one of growth versus equity. The dilemma which social scientists as well as policy makers face is neither growth nor equity can be neglected. So how do you balance equity and growth. Perhaps a politician is much more aware of this, than an academician, because a politician has to face the people at least once in five years!

We should not think that the governments are insensitive about the equity issue. There is a need for organisations to intervene and find out which classes are being affected when a policy is being made. They should think about the type of safety nets required for the affected group. These are the matters I think we should discuss. (PV)

I would like to humbly ask why do we need 10% growth? Why do we need even 4% growth? If the incremental income is only going to go to those who do not need it, is it necessary to have any growth in GDP at all? This is the kind of question all economists should ask. (MVS)

But the one answer that I can think an economist will give is: if you don’t have growth there will be depression. The engines of the economy will come to a grinding halt. . We are part of the integrated system – the hermetically sealed system. Therefore if you don’t have even 4 % of growth then the business cycle is disrupted. Industry comes to a standstill. Prices come down. Can we move away from the idea that the economy has to be viewed as a hermetically sealed system? Is there another way that we can organise our economy? That is the question for this group.

John has spoken about "side-scaling" of alternatives, which are not part of a national grid (decentralised systems). Shiv has raised this question, can we think of alternatives? Sagar has raised the question – can we think of moving away from the notion that the state will be the provider? (MVS)

There is a distinction between free people and freed people. In this country we are freed people. We are not free people and therefore this question has been raised. Who will make science and technology policy people friendly? If someone tries to make science and technology policy people friendly, will it remain people friendly? It is the people who must make it friendly. They must take things into their own hands, there is no other way. And this will happen by building peoples’ power. It will not happen by mimicking state, (centralising systems), but by being independent of a centralising state. We are advocating a re-organising the economy, restructuring the economy in such a way that what happens here doesn’t adversely affect the areas adjacent to this area. I think we need a lot of rethinking on that and science and technology must be thought through in an altogether different way.

We all agree that the state is abdicating its responsibilities. This is not because you and I have asked for it. For other reasons, State is increasingly becoming an administration, rather than a sovereign power. It is scaling down its own operations. The number of employees in the central government may be increasing, but its own interest in running the economy has been scaled down.

Can we therefore think of an alternative way of doing things, a parallel way which Sagar spoke of, which is scaling up of some of our activities, based on our micro experiences, which rely on people themselves, taking charge of their own economy? The scaling up of operations by us, by civil society is implicit in this economic model. In a way it is de-legitimising the state’s own de-legitimisation of itself. (MVS)

Hari Babu: Regarding the de-legitimizing of the state, there is an American republican saying “ I want the state to be so small that I can drag it and drown it in the bathtub”. Industry wants to de-legitimise the state. MNCs want to de-legitimise the state.and we also seem to want that. We must be careful when we say we want to de-legitimisng of the sate. You can always say that a certain policy is not a legitimate policy or that we would like such and such as a policy, but that does not mean that we are trying tode-legitimise the state. Shreekumar spoke about enabling the people from consumer to citizen. But the notion of citizenship is contingent on the existence of state. If there is no state there is no question of citizenship.

What we can say is what is the kind of state that we want. Different sections look at State differently. For some sections of society, the State is very important institution. For example on the issue of reservations the dalits woudl want a strong state to implement the policy of reservation, want a strong state to implement this policy. So the question we have to answer is, what do we want the state to look like.

Harish: The American quotation sounds like it is from a member of the American Rifle Association. I say it partly tongue in cheek and partly seriously. This is the way State is conceived in American discourse. You either belong to the American rifle association or you are an evangelist, or you can be Armish. All of them of them like the State. But they all have state alliances. They don’t like the state for similar reasons or they don’t like the state for not so similar reasons. But they also all like to own rifles.

On a more serious note, The state is in a sense downscaling. Whether we like it or not it is actually happening. The state is being replaced by global governance. In American religious fiction, they write about the coming of the anti-christ, who is primarily a person who will make sure that states do not exist. And the anti-christ is somebody who will bring upon the peace upon the earth. This peace means that states will not be available, and what we have is total governance. And this is a very long-standing American tradition. We see it in the Harry Potter series which sold for forty three million. The Americans are obsessed with this. The only people who are against this anti-christ, are from the evangelical bible association.

There are strange bedfellows in this debate. Even in Marxist secular theory, there is the concept of the withering away of the state. But the withering of the state is not necessarily a good thing, if it is to be replaced by something far more monstrous like global governance. This global governance is accessible mainly to international institutions, corporate institutions, and of course the market. Global governance is symbolised by the ten percent fees that always go to the private consultants. The consultant is the new icon of global governance(for example the Mckinsey Report on Mumbai, or the Dharavi development plan -Ed)), and not civil society as it is made out to be.C ivil society itself is a creation of these global institutions, a creation in its "own image and likeness". And we are victims of that. It is very much like what shiv talks about, when we says we end up mimicking the State. The Acronym KICS is also a victim of that.

The first question is: What is the scope of the policy formulation process?

One of the first steps would be to develop clarity about what we want and design a policy document. We would also need to develop support systems and institutions for what we want to do. The conventional paradigm has a series of support systems. For example a factory requires infrastructure, subsidies, price support, friendly laws and the market which are provided by the support system. These systems will not support the alternatives. Therefore if we are to upscale the alternatives which some of us have developed on a small scale, we need to seriously develop the alternative structures, and institutions (NKS). The support system would include designing of the project schemes and guidelines, and the frameworks for dealing with the government as well as monitor how these alternatives are implemented. They also include developing certain type of organisations outside the government like Community Based Organisations ( CBO) and institutions (namely organisation of organisations-Ed).

Each of us are working in different fields -- some on energy, irrigation, floods, health and so on. Each of these fields have their own technicalities, which others may not understand. So we need to develop institutions which will enable us to work together on issues which we do not understand, but relies on the knowledge base of the specialist organisation. The institution should also deal with the common processes that are needed to upscale the alternative. This does not take place automatically.

For upscaling, or broadbasing our effort across sectors, we could align ourselves to certain steps or milestones. And for each of these steps, we will need certain skills, which are located in different different organisations. The institutions that bring us together would such that individuals and individual organisations would start assuming roles, which fit their respective skills. (NKS)

Structure of our Politics

The points which sastri and Harish made, were not the usual threats to the dominant paradigm - which are ethical threats; aesthetic threats; political threats; activists’ threats. They made cognitive threats to the framework that we are operating in. Let me give an example, if you sit back and listen to all the people who spoke, their politics came through their choice of metaphors. All those who mimicked the state used visual metaphors -- scrutiny, surveillance and watch. All those who used more critical attributes of the state used the language of hearing and listening. I think one of the first thing that we should do is to look at the way we use metaphors to determine the structure of our politics. Because when you start to use visual metaphors and you tend to use the politics of surveillance, the politics of the panoptica, in a way you mimic the politics of the panoptica by reversing the terms of the state. You mirror the state. You mimic the state. You don’t eliminate the state. In fact, the civil society becomes a perpetuation of the state by other means. I think this is what we are clear about, especially when the state is running away from its stateliness.

I think the most exciting part of the seminar was the kind of metaphors that we brought to the table. If you remove the visual metaphors, focus on the auditory metaphors what will lead to a certain kind of linguistic or communication model.

Once we use the language of the state, a deeper more frightening kind of politics is born. What we call the politics of oxymoron or the politics of methodological protocols where to a certain extent you send a message and by the time it reaches, it is already standardized into something else. I think the interesting thing is not the standardization of technology it’s the standardization of language, which is impervious to anything beyond it, which does not allow for translation. Let me list it out.

One is the politics of standardization. That is for a certain extent to say that everyone speaking a dialect has to speak the dominant language. The minute you do that you lose the power of the epistemologies. I remember talking to World Bank officials who kept saying: Why do you use the word epistemology? The World Bank President does not like it. I said because epistemology does not indicate access to knowledge. It is access to a way of life, a way of living, a choice of livelihood, lifestyle.

What happens here is we always tend to go for standardization, homogeneity and uniformity. Why scientists should be standardized? Why should there not be some possibility of translation, some possibility of incommensurability in the sciences. Why do we have to have this subconscious, unconscious boat – for a universal, homogenous standardized space for science?

The next point is about up scaling. I think everyone here is very apologetic about having to up scale themselves. If it is the truth – upscale it. The tragedy of the twenty first century has been the tragedy of electricity and the tragedy of oil. Why do you want to repeat it in a biomass society by up scaling it? Up scaling -- I can’t think of a more genocidal term. So what I am trying to say is that in a friendly way we have absorbed a series of genocidal terms in our discourses. And I think one hopes for some unfashionable academics here, some kind of don’t use me dictionary-- people friendly, eco-friendly, up scaling. I think this is what Harish was saying, about the politics of oxymorons. In fact we should reverse the politics of oxymorons and ask why sustainable development.

What I really worry about is this process of civil society actually deskilling democracy because the democracy of electricity or the democracy of oil can’t be the democracy of a biomass society. Citizenship in electricity or citizenship of oil is based on standardized time and one of the first things that we need is you cannot think of rights which is a standardized term for multiple times. Bio –mass has multiple time. Modern industrial time is too standardized too homogenous for the type of democracy that we are thinking about. Up scaling would be the most horrific thing I can think of. I am game to solving the paradigm crisis – we have just drawn a happy epicycle and I think we have created a new paradigm. And epicycles can be pretty deadly.

The final thing that I want to point out is that we are still stuck between the standard discourses of economics. We are still stuck within the poverty discourses which give a certain notion of entitlement but it fails to fit. It does not consider the fact that today the genocidal state has gone beyond poverty.

I think maybe we should go back and look at what we are saying and what we are doing – how we are looking at the genealogy of terms. Looking at the choice of metaphors because the choice of metaphors can be life giving or life denying. And we have to look at it in logical terms which may not be so obvious. Otherwise you can use friendly terms like democracy but you can use democracy, citizenship, science, and people to actually deskill our people. And I am afraid in a very quiet way we are contributing to that process. There are exceptions. They should not be dissenting terms in this paradigm but they should be the new paradigm in a different sense. And if there can be new paradigm and small stories then I don’t think we have to worry about up scaling. An obsession of the policy is the ruining our politics. But if policy is our politics, then? (SV)

Anathapadmanabhan: I like to keep things simple. We should not lose the ordinary way, in which we use words. There may be larger genealogies and epistemologies in which they are embedded, but there are also simple things that we say to each other that do mean something in the ordinary sense of the word. So I am quite happy to have NPM "scaled up", to have the Joint Foresry Management projects that are run better. better run. It may not bring a shift in paradigm. ( I also don’t know very much what that word means any more, ) . I must say that having thought about many of these things I am quite happy to listen to what I can do, and in working with other people whocan do. I am not terribly exercised by the fact that it is not adding up to very much. We may be losing the larger wars but I am happy to fight the battles and win them.
Whither Science & Technology

From whatever I have heard from the last ten or fifteen days, we are fast approaching an apocalypse. It may not be the end of the world, but it is probably the end of the world, as we know it and we are not prepared for it. If I am sounding terrified it is because I am. And I have been terrified for quite some time.

Let me give you a couple of examples. Just in the last week we have been seeing an advertisement on TV for low cost airlines. A traveler looks askance at a fellow passenger – very casual, all disheveled and with no baggage. Blithely he is told "I am going for a haircut, the barbers’ shops are closed here". For me this is an example of technology gone haywire. Right now we are participating in the process where technology and finances have gone haywire. We are reaching the end of a phase of civilisational pathology.

It is so easy for the system to say that you and I are paranoid. But, You and I are part the system that we point fingers at. We are being pushed into desiring things that we have no control over. For example, if I want to build a house, I cannot build a house of the type that I propagate needs to be built. I have to build the type of house that we see coming up everywhere around us – here in Hyderabad, in Bangalore, Anantapur, and Bhadrachalam. A ‘normal’ (not ‘conventional’- conventional houses are still built with mud walls and thatched roof) house today will cost between Rs10-30 lakhs depending on where I am. The same house if it is to be environmentally friendly will cost Rs 20 - 40 lakhs!

Why is an environmentally friendly house so costly? It is because our understanding of science and technology and environment is so flawed ? We are not re-examining the basics. This is why we are just carrying on like lemmings going into the sea. There is inexorability to this ‘logic’. And, therefore I say that we cannot make science and technology people friendly.

The other point which I would like to make is - can we really talk about making science and technology people friendly without being paternalistic? Most people - and here I am talking about India – are illiterate; and the key segment of the population that can contribute to science and technology – namely women are more illiterate than the rest of us. So what are we talking about? Unless we are able to engage with the large majority, especially women, whatever we are engaged with is fiddling at the edges.

This is not to denigrate what we are doing. It is just to add another dimension to our thinking which is: We are playing in a paradigm, which is playing into people’s hands. This is not the people in the sense that Shiv spoke about, but people who have a great vested interest in keeping the system going. It is a buddy system; and we are willy-nilly sucked into it. We talk nicely, we may be politically correct; we talk radical things but are actually doing the same thing as the system. So this is all a part of a pattern. I do not know if this is a ploy or a plot but there is a pattern in this. It keeps all the so called people illiterate and therefore whatever we do in terms of getting people’s science and technology people friendly is a kind of feudalism, at best a kind of benign paternalism.(WM)

The normative content of Science & Technology
Prof. Prasir Basu:Let me start with the slide that Sagar has shown - that is the party is over. If you look at the changes that globalisation has brought about there is a certain group of people out there for whom the party just has begun. And this has been the reflection of not only the economic regime that is in place, but also certain kinds of science and technology that is in place.

Sagar also mentioned about energy haves and have nots. What I will be taking with me is not so much the question of energy haves and have not, in a sense that the energy haves have indented the energy intensive materials and mechanisms. But I would like to think in terms of entropy rather than someone holding on to energy. The rate of creation of entropy could be better indicator rather than haves and have nots.

Then switching gears as it were, let me sort of think aloud, and ask what exactly is meant by this present S & T policy. If I think that policy has a normative content, which means that the policy tells us in some ways what to use and what not to use, what we need to work out and what we ought to do, then different kinds of questions come up in terms of what we wish to do with the topic before this panel as well as something that we have talked about yesterday concerning science and technology policy, and the question of science and democracy.

Keeping in mind that the policy has a normative content, one needs to ask some very fundamental questions and I am quite sure that all of us do ask and that is - what constitutes the "good life". How does government see or analyse the notion of good life? If we take science and technology, the part of good life is the attainment of a certain kind of knowledge. Knowledge is sometimes taken as a value. But what I have heard here is, and what confirms my worries, is also the concept that knowledge is power, and knowledge leads to control, then where does science and technology, people friendly science and technology, or say science and democracy come in?

One way to visualise is that the democratic process is successful provided the participants are knowledgeable, and that is why we are talking about people friendly - in the sense that people have the basic knowledge for it to be friendly to them. This does not seem to be a problem. That is how it ought to be that participants are equally knowledgeable on working out what constitutes good life and then finding what ought to be done.

The problem that we are confronted with is what kind of knowledge? Who produces that knowledge, how do we use that knowledge. But more importantly how we impart knowledge? Knowledge is never questioned. It is something that is passed on. So constantly there is this reconfiguration of knowledge.

So the question therefore is what kind of scientific knowledge is reproduced, and how is this related to democracy. This has been answered predominantly by science and technology policy and scientific community and needless to say that this model of knowledge has been called Western knowledge.

But there is an interesting attempt to break the dominance of the science and technology community and its configuration of what knowledge is. In some ways I find this goes back to 1958, unwittingly making a point about science and technology and the positive element of knowledge followed by the recognition that the dissemination of scientific knowledge, and the inculcation of scientific temper will lead to democratisation.

I think Nehruvian policy, at least had an attempt in paper to bring in the people at large into the ambit of what may be called peoples’ scientific thinking. Howsoever flawed it is, this is what I find missing from the second S & T policy and regulation. What has happened to the 1958 policy statement and how has it changed to become the recent policy statement?

The recent S&T policy assumes that the western scientific knowledge is what the Indian people what to know and that there cannot be any kind of debate on this. In fact what kind of scientific knowledge is not the question that needs to be asked and as a matter of fact, therefore the issue of scientific temper is not questioned.
One question I ask myself is, has the nature of scientific temper changed so drastically that we do not have the categories philosophically to demarcate science and technology anymore? My contention at this point is that I need to look at the beginning of the amalgamation of science and technology. This goes back to 1945, to the making of the atom bomb - which is not the confluence of science and technology, not a discipline but a kind of reward. Since then what constituted objects of science and what constitutes objects of technology have meshed together so well that we do have something like techno-science.

And therefore the question for me is not whether we can have science and technology policy, not whether we should have scientific temper, (instrumental rationality etc.), but a) to understand the character and b) how does it modify the concept of democracy.

Because we just say that this is the science, we will disseminate scientific temper, scientific knowledge, they will be good citizens, and they will participate in the democratic process, but that is completely within the framework of science which is Western.

Coming back to what Sagar Dhara said - the party is over, we have proven that the party has just begun. (Prajit Basu)

Role of Civil Society: Structural Transformation

In the early part of our work, those of us engaged in social, economic and political development since the ‘60s and ‘70s, worked in a paradigm that we used to call Structural Change. So we wanted to change the structures of power. And we thought that if we just throw out those people in power and replaced them with another lot of people in power like the proletariat, peasants or whatever, then things would change. But they did not. Mainly because the discourse on how to deal with science and technology was the same. And therefore today the Left wants Polavarams or big dams or whatever, as much as the capitalist societies - the domination of centralised, controlled, lab researched, intensive technologies, needing vast economies of scale, thrust with large capital.

Having seen that paradigm fail, or rather having been disillusioned with the possibility of revolution, we then got into the next paradigm, Structural Adjustment. And I think we are operating most of the time in that paradigm of structural adjustment. This is not to denigrate what we are doing because it is a compulsion - because we are part of the system. So in this paradigm we get to deal with the small victories that we talk about. It came out very clearly in the various discussions that we have had in the last couple of days – namely policy victories, policy failures, dealing with bureaucrats, politicians, etc. These are all in the politics of structural adjustment. The structure will adjust with small victories, small failures, and large hopes. But whatever happens, the structures will by and large remain the same.
So is there something else that we also need to engage with? Some other paradigms that we need to develop? I would like to posit the paradigm of structural transformation. Probably we can explore this in this forum. And that is why I am bringing it up at this point.

What is the paradigm of structural transformation? Revolutions don’t happen in an instant. Those that happen don’t last long. Such revolutions are not sustainable. They successfully happen when there is a new set of practices and theories that gain momentum, pass a threshold, and gain currency. Policy follows practice, follows a tipping point. There are a range of intermediary institutions and practices that develop, such that the dispersed experiments and enterprises coalesce are integrated into a sustainable web. So if the scale of organic farming or NPM agriculture is to posit an alternative, if it has to gain currency, we need to develop intermediary democratized institutions that do not follow the same dominant path of centralized, large scale capital intensive models.

We are at a juncture where a civilisational shift is possible. Only time will tell. The multiple crises of Global Warming, Peak Oil, Identities under Siege, et al are upon us. There is a possibility for us to shift away from the current paradigm be it capitalism, technology, the West or western civilization, this that or the other. There is not only a possibility there is an urgent need. In fact, it is not just a need -- it is going to happen whether we like it or not.

We have the opportunity to perceive the crises. We also have another opportunity, which is that we are in India. One small, elite section of India wants to go down that path of multiple crises. But we are not yet there, we have not yet gone all the way down that path – we have not yet arrived. We are merely the macho-superpower-in-waiting. Most of our people are living sustainable lifestyles, by default - what we call the bio-mass paradigm. And this is where the direction probably lies - and there is something for us to learn and develop over here. Is that possible? How can it be done? There are no ready-made answers for us. It is something that we have to create. We don’t know what will happen which is why time and again we say that we do not have an alternative. We can only presume and hypothesise. Because the alternative is not in the here and now, it is something in the future and something we need to work towards in the here and now. The interlocking, intermediary institutions need to develop and gain currency. It is a long and winding road.

Thus, in a forum like KICS, we will be engaged with mundane and exhilarating issues in the paradigm of structural adjustment with the existing structures, making them more user friendly, more transparent, regulated, and socially responsible.

We also need to be involved in mundane and exhilarating issues in the paradigm of structural transformation of diverse, dispersed, decentralized sustainable options.
Thus KICS will deal with energy in the paradigm of adjustment, as well as in the paradigm of transformation. And this goes for health, agriculture, education …
In this effort, we have to keep in mind a couple of things.
One of them is the notion of sacrifice. I think sacrifice has become a bad word in the past few decades. Every religion has a notion of sacrifice, and sacrifice is not merely giving up something. Sacrifice also has a connotation of holding something to be sacred. Whether you look at it as a scapegoat, and it takes away your sins, or whatever it is, it is something that you know is sacred and which one holds in esteem above all; in such esteem that one is willing to ‘sacrifice’ other things.
Even if we go beyond organised religion or beyond the practice of rituals, there is something that we need to look at: things held sacred, not so much because a high priest or a shaman or somebody else tells us. Today there is a reverence with which society looks at technology and science, oil, FDI (foreign direct investment), markets, capital, consumerism.

What we need to engage with is - what is it that we need to make sacred, which will be recognisable as the sacred in this civilizational shift, something for which we can make sacrifices. Therefore I am all with Harish saying let us take off our clothes, figuratively and literally, and be naked – shed/get rid of some of the other assumptions we hold dear - sacred. We are then not just part of the problem - fiddling at the edges, at the periphery of things scientific, things technological.We can also be engaged as part of the solution. (WM)

Prof Venkataramaiah: .Whatever is the policy frame, there will always be some problem. Civil society organisations have done considerable work with good effect in so many sectors. We have seen that civil society has made some impact on the energy front, on power purchase agreements and on issues such as genetic modification, and gender. BT cotton, on anti GM or gender issues. It is necessary to dissent from the dominant paradigm in order to enhance the welfare of the people even if you dont throw it outright. No paradigm will give equal opportunities to every people in every sector.Whatever is the paradigm one may decide, one must at least address the gaps that in the present processto see that the policy does good for the people, and favourable regulatory structures are in place. It is also necessary to identify alternative institutional frameworks which could lead us to the alternative and develop those. .

My friend Mr. Shastri has contested the need for growth, in the context of environment and sustainability as well as in the context of who benefits from that growth. We are moving from a growth index to a happiness index - a happiness of the people.

I thank you all for your cooperation.